Not That Oliver
OLIVER
Oliver had never liked retreating. Departures possessed intention, arrivals at least offered the possibility of surprise, but retreating asked a man to admire the scenery while admitting someone or something had made remaining inconvenient.
His ribs objected to the distinction. Every fourth step along the survey track produced a low ache beneath his right side, and his bandaged hand had begun throbbing in time with his pulse.
The pines climbed east from Seraphine's ruined refuge in close dark ranks.
Salt wind still reached them between the trunks, carrying smoke from the headland and the delayed concussion of guns beyond it.
Below, where the slope dropped toward the invisible Strait, the sea occasionally flashed between branches like polished steel.
Marin walked twenty feet ahead because she had decided nearly blinding herself with Strain did not exempt her from inspecting the path. She had stopped bleeding from the nose. Oliver considered that encouraging. The white wrap around her left palm had not stayed white for long.
"You are limping," he said.
She did not look back. "So are you."
"Mine is decorative."
"Yours is compensatory and putting strain through the opposite hip."
Oliver looked down at himself as if his body had betrayed confidential information. "I miss when you found me mysterious."
"I found you annoying. The mystery was secondary."
Seraphine, pushing the rear handle of the fishermen's narrow handcart, laughed quietly.
The injured woman on the cart had introduced herself as Tavia after the world stopped disagreeing about where the cove belonged.
Her lower leg was splinted between two pieces of oar, wrapped hard enough that each bump still drew the color from her face.
Her sister Anwen walked beside her with one hand on the cart rail, while old Harlan had accepted Oliver's coat and rejected every suggestion that the pressure in his chest might justify riding.
"Family resemblance," Seraphine said.
"I am choosing to believe you mean the charm."
"I meant the inability to accept useful instruction."
"Also hereditary."
Marin stopped at the next rise. Not dramatically. She simply ceased moving, one hand settling against the trunk of a pine as if she had intended to examine its bark all along. Oliver was beside her before the thought became a decision.
"Vision?"
"Normal."
"Nausea?"
"No."
"Dizziness?"
Her eyes shifted toward him. "You have become intolerable since learning medical vocabulary."
"That sounds like dizziness."
"It sounds like irritation." She took one careful breath, then another. "The slope changed faster than I did. Give me ten seconds."
Oliver did. He disliked it. Dislike was not refusal.
The survey track had once belonged to some coastal mapping office Seraphine remembered only as a collection of men who arrived every spring with brass instruments, notebooks and unreasonable confidence about weather.
Their route followed the ridge toward an abandoned signal station above the inland road.
From there, she said, an old charcoal track descended into farming country far enough from the Strait that naval guns would need either better maps or worse judgment to reach it.
Ordinary distance. Ordinary roads. Oliver had developed an embarrassing affection for both.
Behind them, another report rolled across the headland. Birds lifted from the trees in a black wave. Tavia flinched on the cart, and Harlan stopped pretending not to count the seconds until the echo returned.
"Farther north," Seraphine said.
Marin had already turned her head toward the sound. "Two impacts."
"You can tell?" Anwen asked.
"I can tell there were two sounds close enough together to overlap." Marin took her hand from the tree. "Anything beyond that would be theatre."
Oliver smiled. He had loved prettier lies before. Increasingly, he found precision more seductive.
The track crossed an abandoned narrow-gauge railway half a mile later.
Two rusted rails emerged from the pines, ran beside the survey path for perhaps fifty yards and disappeared into a cutting blasted through granite.
Ferns grew between the sleepers. A switch stand leaned beside the junction with the offended posture of machinery that had been left outdoors for thirty years and expected an apology.
Seraphine stopped the cart. "Survey line. The mapping office used it to move instruments down to the inland road."
Oliver looked at the rails. "Does it still go anywhere?"
"The signal station. Then the old charcoal depot."
Marin crouched beside the nearest rail without opening Perception. She scraped rust from the head with the edge of her boot and examined the brighter metal beneath. "Used recently."
Seraphine's expression changed. "It shouldn't be."
A shout came from the cutting before anyone could make that more comforting.
Grey coats appeared between the pines, followed by the unmistakable profile of a rifle held low rather than aimed.
Four soldiers came around the bend with a fifth man behind them carrying a short pry bar over one shoulder.
None wore naval blue. Their insignia had been removed or covered with grey cloth.
Anwen moved closer to her sister. Harlan handed Oliver his coat back and reached for a fishing knife that had no plausible military application.
"Keep the knife," Oliver murmured. "Avoid looking enthusiastic about it."
The lead soldier called in Rhovaini. Seraphine answered, her tone more irritated than frightened. The exchange went quickly enough that Oliver caught only place names and one obscenity he was reasonably certain referred to a ship.
"Local defense," she translated. "For the moment."
"Whose local defense?" Marin asked.
The officer came closer and answered in Trade himself. He was perhaps forty, greying at the temples, with mud to his knees and the exhausted expression of a man whose chain of command had recently become theoretical.
"Captain Kelm. Coastal district militia. The flag is a question for tomorrow. Today I am moving civilians away from the guns."
Oliver liked the answer more than its circumstances. Kelm's gaze moved over Seraphine, Marin's bloody hand, Tavia's splint and finally Oliver's face. Recognition arrived slowly and improved nothing.
"Hawkins."
"Unfortunately."
"Your face is in three different field circulars."
"Only three? I am losing relevance."
Marin looked at him. Oliver allowed the joke to die without assistance. Growth remained humiliatingly observable.
Kelm pointed toward the cutting. "Signal station is half a mile. We have a mule wagon there and a surgeon's assistant who still answers to that title when people are bleeding. We can move your injured."
"Why the rail?" Marin asked.
The captain glanced uphill. "Because the charcoal road washed out last week. We are using the old line to bring medical crates down from the ridge storehouse. Two flat wagons at a time. Hand brakes and gravity. Very advanced military doctrine."
"Gravity has excellent logistics," Oliver said.
"It also outranks me. Stay off the track until the next load passes."
A metallic crack sounded somewhere above the cutting. Kelm went still.
Not a gunshot. Not artillery. Oliver knew the sound from ships and warehouses, the ugly high note of iron failing under load. One of the soldiers swore.
"Brake chain," Kelm said.
Then the rails began to sing. Everyone looked uphill.
A flat wagon came out of the cutting without anyone on it.
It was small by freight standards, perhaps twelve feet long, loaded with wooden medical crates and two drums lashed beneath canvas.
Freight scale stopped being reassuring when several tons of iron, timber and supplies acquired a downhill opinion.
The wagon hit the first joint in the rail hard enough to jump, landed again and accelerated.
"Clear the line!" Kelm shouted.
Ordinary competence moved before fear finished becoming useful.
Anwen took the front of Tavia's handcart.
Seraphine seized the rear. Harlan limped toward the uphill bank where the ground rose less steeply.
Two soldiers abandoned their rifles and grabbed the cart frame.
Marin looked once at the cutting, once at the junction, and went straight for the switch stand. Oliver followed her.
"Spur?"
"Dead-ends behind the retaining bank," Kelm said, running with them. "If we throw the points, the wagon buries itself instead of reaching the lower road."
"If?" Oliver asked.
Kelm struck the switch lever with his boot. It moved three inches and stopped.
"If."
The runaway wagon was still more sound than object inside the cutting. Wheels hammered rail joints in an accelerating rhythm. Oliver estimated twenty seconds, distrusted the estimate and immediately reduced it to fifteen.
Marin knelt beside the mechanism. Rust packed the linkage around the throw rod. The near switch tongue had separated from the stock rail by perhaps two inches, enough to send a wheel wherever physics found funniest.
"Pry bar," she said.
The soldier carrying it handed it over. Marin planted the end beneath the throw rod and used her right shoulder rather than the damaged left hand. Kelm leaned onto the switch lever. Oliver took the bar below her grip.
"On three," Marin said.
"How authoritarian."
"One. Two."
They heaved. The mechanism screamed. Rust flaked away in orange sheets. The lever moved another foot, then kicked back hard enough that Kelm nearly lost it.
"Again," Marin said.
Behind them, Seraphine and the soldiers dragged Tavia's cart toward the bank. One wheel dropped between the rail and a cracked drainage stone.
Anwen cried out. "It's stuck."
Oliver looked once. The cart could not clear before the wagon reached them unless the wheel came free immediately. Seraphine had already dropped to one knee, pulling the frame upward while a soldier kicked at the trapped stone.
"Get the switch," Marin said.